I am an entrepreneur and communications expert from Salt Lake City and founder of SnappConner PR. I am the author of Beyond PR: Communicate Like A Champ The Digital Age, available on Amazon. I am also a frequent author and speaker on communication and am co-creator of the Content University program for executives. The opinions I express (especially when tongue in cheek) are entirely my own. My newsletter is the Snappington Post, available at http://bit.ly/1iv67Wk

Crowdfund Secrets From An Expert Who Raised $1.5M In 6 Consecutive Campaigns

Actually, Hays concedes, the PR consultant he hired was a tremendous resource to his project and he regarded her highly, and he considers the largest fault for PR’s failure to influence his funding goal was his own. “I got out of the driver’s seat and disengaged, thinking the PR efforts would take over the helm. It didn’t work out.”

Furthermore, he recommends that PR not start before or at the start of a campaign but should begin in the middle. “Launch your campaign with your friends and their friends to see how they’re responding, and let PR kick in at the halfway point where the press (and their readers) can peer in and see the project is succeeding. If you send the stories and the readers in at the beginning, they see an unknown possibility, and you are sowing the seeds of your own demise.” (Let alone the fact that TechCrunch, enGadget, etc., are unlikely to take the news or the project seriously enough to cover it at all until they’ve seen the trend to success, I would add.)

“Pebble got no press until they were over $1 million raised and at $2 million their story was in the Wall Street Journal, and then it was everywhere. But the success was the story. Not the watch.”

What about Bandwagon Marketing, I ask? The process of priming the pump with orchestrated efforts from friends? “We’ve never resorted to that,” Hays says. “Instead, you need to figure out how to access the audience that is really going to care about this project and enlist their help in getting others to care. In my case, I do niche films about political and controversial topics. So that’s where we target our efforts. The more direct the message to the specific audience you’re after the better, as opposed to a general campaign for PR.

For tech products that have a more general appeal you should look towards engaging Gawker and TechCrunch, but don’t bring them in too soon don’t expect them to be doing the job of creating your list of advocates and investors for you. And don’t expect your PR agency to carry the ball.

4. Learn the Obama Strategy. Get People in. Change Strategy Halfway Through and Add New Rewards. Your crowdfund page is a living, dynamic website, Hays says. Consider the strategy of the first and second Obama presidency campaigns. As the first step, the campaign was pitching the whole world to contribute $5 apiece. “We need to get this goal accomplished, can you contribute $5?” Their internal goal was to get as many people as possible to contribute $5 apiece at the start, and over the next months guide as many of them as possible to maximum contributions of $2,250-2,500.

In a crowdfund campaign people think “okay, I’ve donated” and the decision is finished, but in fact they are now on a track. In the beginning, go after a $10 contribution and the contributor’s name will go on site. Set the bar as low as possible, and design the rewards toward the goal of gathering as big a crowd as you can. Then, halfway through the campaign, you add new rewards for the $10 donors designed to move them up in commitment, Hays suggests. At this point you can also begin a referral campaign. “If you refer two people we’ll give you a t-shirt,” for example, because they are contacts who’ve already raised their hands. So you add new incentives to increase the commitments and gather additional referral leads on the way.

5. Consider Reset Days and Optimal lengths of Campaigns. The most successful campaigns are 21-32 days in range. While you can run a campaign for up to 60 days, that length of time doesn’t put enough pressure on people to contribute right now. The best campaigns are 30-32 days long. Also—as an undocumented “secret”—it’s not acknowledged anywhere on Indigogo site, but the rules have now changed to allow you during the process to extend your campaign. “So in our cases, we’ll set our campaign for 30 days, let the process run down to one day remaining, and then ask Indigogo to extend the project for 30 more days.” According to Hays, Indigogo is the only platform he’s aware of that currently allows for this option, and they don’t publicize the possibility, but it is often an advantageous thing to pursue.

“The first time we did this, Indigogo had called us and said, “You have so much momentum do you want to extend for 17 more days?” And they later made it a standard but little known policy that this was possible for you to do.

Another Indigogo advantage to consider is that you can have access to the incoming funds that come in through PayPal right away. For example, Hays’ campaigns tend to receive approximately 20% of their donations through PayPal and for one of his friends, the sum is approximately 40%. In either case, the PayPal money can fund the Facebook advertising campaign that helps you to go the rest of the way to your goal. “When my close friend started his campaign he didn’t have the money to fund a Facebook campaign, but the PayPal feature in Indigogo allowed him to make his campaign self funding—a huge plus.”

6. Create a Forwarding Domain to use for Speaking and Radio, and to Create Bonus Campaigns to Catch Trailing Donors. Here’s a way to create a bonus campaign to catch trailing donors: “I always create a domain with a name like “JoinXXXMovement.com,” or, when I did my movie for chiropractors, I got “SupportChiroMovie.com.” Be sure to choose a phrase that is easy to remember and forward the domain to the link for your current campaign. The easy-to-remember domain can have a second purpose as well, Hays explains: “We had momentum at the end of our Kickstarter campaign from people were just finding finding out about the project. They may have read the blog just that week. So we set up a mirror campaign at RocketHub so that when the Kickstarter campaign ended at midnight, the RocketHub campaign began. I re-forwarded the domain sentence to the new campaign and we raised another $30,000, which is additional funding we’d have otherwise lost.”

7. Matching Investment Funds Can Bring in Money Both Ways. A couple of campaigns ago Hays was in talks with a prospective investor who was sitting on the fence about putting money into two of his films. He had the potential to invest $150,000 but was deliberating about whether or not to jump in. “So we asked if he would put in matching funds for the sum we were able to raise.” For the investors, the deal became much more attractive because they were doubling their equity for each dollar committed without dilution. For contributors the deal was more attractive as well, because every dollar contributed would bring a total of $2 towards the goal. “Everybody likes to be a part of a deal that has leverage, and this arrangement provides for leverage both ways.”

8. Build a List Within the Campaign, and Use the List To Campaign. Now that you have every contributor’s address, print and send a postcard to thank them, which increases their bond to your program, and also announce your plans to run a second campaign and that you look forward to getting their help as you prepare for Campaign 2, Hays said. “In my case, from little list of 500 chiropractors and 450 Facebook friends we’ve developed an active list of 11-12,000 people who’ve now contributed to our campaigns. Remember to take great care of these people over time. And also remember that your list is uniquely valuable on its own.”

9. Create a Referral Campaign. Get your Facebook “likes” working for you and amplifying the reach of your ads. “Our current campaign is the first time we’ve run Facebook ads,” Hays says. “Facebook ads are great because of their ability to closely target our customer. But along with the likes, we also encourage our viewers to share. An ad that we pay for to distribute to 400-500-600 people may end up being viewed by more than 1,000 people thanks to the additional visibility that comes from the ‘likes’ and the ‘shares’.” Hays has used Facebook ads to support his current campaign—his fourth—for SupportBoughtMovie.com.

“I don’t know anyone else yet who’s done four campaigns for one movie,” he says. “Who knew it could be so successful? Our initial goal was to raise $40,000. Now we’ve raised $300,00 so far. With a $40,000 goal on the current campaign we’re at $65,432–$25,000 over goal—and have added 1,031 new funders with 24 more days to go. I predict this campaign will end at more than $100,000.”

10. Ride the Wave; Don’t Cry Wolf. Understand that the cycles of donation will move up and down, Hays says. “When we communicate to our list, activity spikes and then it dies down. We find that weekends are the slowest, and contributions tend to drop off. But don’t be flogging your list every day. You will have lulls in activity and then you stimulate the list again, but you can’t be crying wolf to your list every day.

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